I read with interest the Aug. 8 column by Frances Coleman, titled "Where did the Coast Guard of Katrina go?" While I am so long retired from that great organization that I have little contact with daily operations, I’d suspect that much of the U.S. Coast Guard that she and others love and respect is still there.

What people need to recognize is the fundamental difference in the responses to the two very different disasters.

Katrina was an immediate danger to life, where the Deepwater Horizon spill was a protracted pollution response incident on a scale never before attempted.

"Coasties" have been doing search-and-rescue for generations. It’s in our DNA to do what’s necessary when lives are at risk — including risking and sometimes losing our own in the process.

Two very different forces were in play during the Deepwater Horizon incident: "Incident command" and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (known as OPA 90). OPA 90 is a federal law passed in the aftermath of that other great oil spill — the Exxon Valdez in Alaska.

In general, OPA 90 holds "responsible parties" to the responsibility of cleaning up disasters like Deepwater Horizon. The federal government will only step in and federalize the response in cases where the responsible party utterly fails in its response efforts.

It was and is a delicate dance between BP and the Coast Guard to ensure that BP did and does everything possible to satisfy its duties as the responsible party.

The Incident Command System is the name given to a complex organizational tool that is part of the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Incident command and NIMS were developed in the aftermath of 9/11, when it was so clear that the responses of so many diverse agencies were fragmented and ineffective.

Something better was needed to establish coherence in these hugely complex response and recovery operations.

The Incident Command System was originally developed in the 1970s in Southern California to coordinate the activities of dozens of fire departments as they joined forces to battle the annual wildfires. In that context, it works like a well-oiled machine.

After 9/11, this system was adopted nationwide and applied to even more complex command-and-control challenges. That’s where the troubles started.

The Incident Command System works wonderfully within the fire community, but when you apply it to more complex incidents, sometimes involving hundreds of different agencies, each with their own agendas, then the system doesn’t work so well.

Efforts to refine it and make it work better in these national disaster scenarios has been one of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA’s highest priorities for the past five years. I should know. I chair one of the developmental working groups for FEMA, representing the interests and concerns of municipal law enforcement in this national developmental process.

Ms. Coleman was absolutely correct when she said that there are problems with the Incident Command System. It’s too complex; it takes too long to get qualified to fill the senior organization chart positions; many elements of the federal government opt out of it completely, so it’s not truly a "national" system; and it’s not used enough operationally on a national scale for people to get really good at it.

That being said, it’s far better than what we had before — which was, in many cases, organizational breakdowns.

In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill, I expect that Congress will take a fundamental look at how the response mechanisms worked, and that new legislation will be forthcoming that fixes the basic incompatibility between OPA 90 and the Incident Command System and National Incident Management System — just like the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill produced OPA 90.

As for FEMA and working groups like mine, we’ll keep at it, making improvements in a system that’s vital to our homeland security.

In the meantime, Ms. Coleman shouldn’t worry about the Coast Guard. The folks in the white ships and the red helos are still there, as motivated as ever.

Richard Cashdollar is a retired Coast Guard captain and senior adviser for the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association. He served12 years as executive director of public safety for the city of Mobile. Hise-mail address iscashdollar521@msn.com.